Tuesday, May 12, 2009

below is a letter i sent to the philadelphia inquirer this morning upon learning that they have hired john yoo, the chief architect of the bush-cheney torture policies, to write a monthly column for the paper.

I wanted to inform you that I will no longer be reading the Philadelphia Inquirer due to the paper's hiring of John Yoo to provide a monthly column.

It is unconscionable to me how the Inquirer could hire a columnist who was the architect for Bush & Cheney's torture policies. You are now giving a public forum to a man who swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, a document that has so much meaning to the city of Philadelphia, yet his body of work is one that is decidedly against the values and principles the Constitution stands for.

Let me be clear: this is not just about Yoo's right-wing ideology, although it is somewhat curious that the Inquirer's op-ed contributors are decidedly right-wing (Rick Santorum & Michael Smerconish come to mind) in a city that is one of the most liberal and Democratic in the nation (ever stop to think that maybe this is one of the contributing factors in the Inquirer's decline in readership?). This is about Yoo's role as a defender of torture. This is about Yoo's role as the architect of the previous administration's torture policy. This is about Yoo's complete disregard for human rights and the values of the United States of America. He SHOULD NOT be rewarded for his cowardice and poor judgment. The previous 8 years under Bush-Cheney are a black eye on this country and it pains me to see the architects of failure being so handsomely rewarded.

Because the Inquirer has shown a complete lack of judgment in this hiring, I hereby inform you that I will not read this newspaper until Yoo's employment is terminated. Fortunately for me we live in an age where Tiebout sorting for news on the Internet is as easy as 1-2-3, so I don't think I will miss the Inquirer much in my daily news consumption.